Typhoon. Charles Cumming
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but this was the first time that he had agreed to take on an intelligence officer as an employee. At first, Ted’s Singaporean wife Judy, who also functioned as his secretary, wasn’t keen on the idea, but when the Cross bought her a Chanel handbag and bumped up her salary by twenty per cent she embraced Joe like a long-lost son. Nominally he was required to show up every day and to field whatever faxes and phone calls came into the office from clients looking to move freight consignments around the world, but in reality Ted and Judy continued to deal with over ninety-five per cent of Heppner business, leaving Joe free to carry out his work for Queen and Country. If anybody asked why an Oxford graduate with a starred First in Mandarin was earning less than £20,000 a year working for a logistics company in Hong Kong, Joe told them that he’d been involved in a failed business venture back home and had just wanted to get the hell out of London. If they continued to pry, he hinted that he saw Heppner’s as a short-term option which would allow him, within six or eight months, to apply for a job with one of the larger Taipan conglomerates, such as Swire’s or Jardine Matheson.
It was illustrative of the extreme sensitivity of Joe’s position that Ted and Judy were two of only a handful of people who knew that Joe was under non-official cover. The others included David Waterfield, Head of Station for SIS in Hong Kong, Waterfield’s second-in-command, Kenneth Lenan, and Rick Zagoritis, a legendary figure in the Far East Controllerate who acted as Joe’s mentor and go-between in the first few months of his posting. I became aware of his activities when Zagoritis was obliged to fly to London for medical reasons in the autumn of 1995. Up to that point, Rick had been my SIS handler. As a result of an article I had written for the Sunday Times Magazine about Teochiu triad heroin dealers, London had become interested in the contacts I had made in the criminal underworld and I had provided Zagoritis with detailed assessments of the structure and intentions of triad groups in the Pearl River Delta. With Rick gone, I needed a new handler.
That was when Joe stepped in. It was a considerable challenge for such a junior player, but he proved a more than competent replacement. Within less than a year of arriving in the colony, he had made a name for himself as a highly effective NOC. Nor were there any concerns about his private life. In two reports commissioned by Kenneth Lenan as routine checks into the behaviour of new recruits, Joe demonstrated himself to be surprisingly self-disciplined when confronted by the myriad opportunities for hedonism which are part and parcel of male expat life in Asia. (‘He’ll learn,’ Waterfield muttered glumly. ‘He’ll learn.’) Nor was he troubled by the paranoia and duplicity of his double life. One of the more potent myths of the secret world, put about by spy writers and journalists and excitable TV dramas, is that members of the intelligence community struggle constantly with the moral ambiguity of their trade. This may be true of a few broken reeds, most of whom are quietly shown the door, but Joe lost little sleep over the fact that his life in Hong Kong was an illusion. He had adjusted easily to the secret existence, as if he had found his natural vocation. He loved the work, he loved the environment, he loved the feeling of playing a pivotal role in the covert operations of the state. About the only thing that was missing in his life was a woman.
Isabella Aubert arrived at the restaurant at about twenty-past eight. The first indication that she had entered the room came with a simultaneous movement from two male diners sitting near the entrance, whose heads jerked up from their bowls of soup and then followed her body in a kind of dazed, nodding parabola as she swayed between the tables. She was wearing a black summer dress and a white coral necklace that seemed to glow under the lights against her tanned skin. Joe must have picked up on the crackle in the room because he pushed his chair back from the table, stood up and turned to face her. Isabella was smiling by now, first at me, then at Joe, checking around the restaurant to see if she recognized anyone. Joe kissed her only briefly on the cheek before she settled into the chair next to mine. Physically, in public, they were often quite formal together, like a couple who had been married for five or ten years, not two twenty-six-year-olds in only the second year of a relationship. But if you spent time around Joe it didn’t take long to realize that he was infatuated with Isabella. She dismantled his instinctive British reserve; she was the one thing in his life that he could not control.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you, Will?’ Our little hug of greeting went wrong when I aimed a kiss at her cheek that slid past her ear.
‘I’m fine,’ I replied. ‘You?’
‘Hot. Overworked. Late.’
‘You’re not late.’ Joe reached out to touch her hand. Their fingers mingled briefly on the table before Isabella popped her napkin. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’
They had met in December 1995, on Joe’s first visit back to the UK from Hong Kong, when he had been an usher at a wedding in Hampshire. Isabella was a friend of the bride’s who had struggled to keep a straight face while reading from ‘The Prophet’ during the service. ‘Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself,’ she told the assembled congregation. ‘He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness.’ At one point Joe became convinced that the beautiful girl at the lectern in the wide-brimmed hat was looking directly at him as she said, ‘He kneads you until you are pliant. And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast,’ but it was probably just a trick of the light. At that moment, most of the men in the church were labouring under a similar delusion. Afterwards Isabella sought him out at the pre-dinner drinks, walking towards him carrying a glass of champagne and that hat, which had lost its flower.
‘What happened?’ he said.
‘Dog,’ she replied, as if that explained everything. They did not leave one another’s side for the next two hours. At dinner, seated at separate tables, they made naked eyes across the marquee as a farmer complained to Isabella about the iniquities of the Common Agricultural Policy while Joe told a yawning aunt on his left that freight forwarding involved moving ‘very large consignments of cargo around the world in big container ships’ and that Hong Kong was ‘the second busiest port in Asia after Singapore’, although ‘both of them might soon be overtaken by Shanghai’. As soon as pudding was over he took a cup of coffee over to Isabella’s table and sat at a vacant chair beside hers. As they talked, and as he met her friends, for the first time he regretted having joined SIS. Not because the life required him to lie to this gorgeous, captivating girl, but because within four days he would be back at his desk on the other side of the world drafting CX reports on the Chinese military. Chances are he would never see Isabella again.
Towards eleven o’clock, when the speeches were done and middle-aged fathers in red trousers had begun dancing badly to ‘Come on Eileen’, she simply leaned across to him and whispered in his ear, ‘Let’s go.’ Joe had a room at a hotel three miles away but they drove back along the M40 to Isabella’s flat in Kentish Town, where they stayed in bed for two days. ‘We fit,’ she whispered when she felt his naked body against hers for the first time, and Joe found himself adrift in a world that he had never known: a world in which he was so physically and emotionally fulfilled that he wondered why it had taken him so long to seek it out. There had been girlfriends before, of course – two at Oxford and one just a few days after he had arrived in Hong Kong – but with none of them had he experienced anything other than the brief extinguishing of a lust, or a few weeks of intense conversations about the Cultural Revolution followed by borderline pointless sex in his rooms at Wadham. From their first moments together Isabella intrigued and fascinated him to the point of obsession. He confessed to me that he was already planning their lives together after spending just twenty-four hours in her flat. Joe Lennox had always been a decisive animal, and Joe Lennox had decided that he was in love.
On the Monday night he drove back to his hotel in Hampshire, settled the bill, returned to London and took Isabella for dinner at Mon Plaisir, a French restaurant he loved in Covent Garden. They ate French onion soup, steak tartare and confit of duck and drank two bottles of Hermitage